Drupal® 7 Bible

Chapter 33. Creating a Search Engine-Friendly Site

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating search engine-friendly URLs

• Managing canonicalization issues

• Adding content metadata

• Optimizing page templates

• Creating custom error pages

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and others have become the doorways to the Web. The ability of these engines to accurately and meaningfully index the content of your Web site is, fortunately, something you have some control over.

The practice of search engine optimization—commonly known as SEO—is the means you have for exercising this control.

Certain SEO practices are considered by major search engine companies to be underhanded and against their rules. However, you have at your disposal a number of practices that are simple, broadly useful, and even encouraged by organizations in the search industry. I focus on these aspects of SEO in this chapter.

Tip

The folks at Google have published a SEO starter guide that you may find useful. You can access the PDF version of the guide at http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf.

Drupal, like most content management systems, comes with a mixture of good and not-so-good SEO configurations. What's important to understand is that the system is configurable enough to achieve a high level of SEO. And further, with the semantic Web features that have made their way into the Drupal 7 core, the system is moving from a respectable position toward a leadership position in terms of SEO.

This chapter ...